


as large as alone (fifteen ways to tell your story)

by Riana1



Series: a crown for your kingdom come [1]
Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012), Tangled (2010)
Genre: Crossover Pairings, Gen, I Blame Tumblr, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Stealth Crossover, all canons are true, kitchen sink cosmology, mother nature is a scary lady, some bad words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:38:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riana1/pseuds/Riana1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Offer up your empty aching sternum to inspection; the bare bones will do- once there was a great golden general who swept the darkness from the stars and locked all fear away in a prison, only during his lonely vigil he betrayed his duty unwittingly for the sound of his daughter’s voice and became the king of nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as large as alone (fifteen ways to tell your story)

 So this was inspired by twilight's **fifteen ways to turn into a monster** and daphne gottlieb’s  **fifteen ways to stay alive** and I spend way too much time try to reconclide canons in my head.

 

“As small as a world as large as alone.”  
― E.E. Cummings

“You are my sun,  
my moon, and  
all my stars.”  
― E.E. Cummings

 

1\. Tell a lie: all stories are true.

 

2\. Offer up your empty aching sternum to inspection; the bare bones will do- once there was a great golden general who swept the darkness from the stars and locked all fear away in a prison, only during his lonely vigil he betrayed his duty unwittingly for the sound of his daughter’s voice and became the king of nightmares. Don’t tell how Nietzsche was wrong, the abyss doesn’t stare into you, it devours you from the inside out and wears your skin like a well-tailored suit. Don’t offer the up details, it’ll scare the kiddies (and they are all children to you by now).                                                                                    

 

3\. Continue.

 

4\. Speak of the daughter and the witch. Tell about how the daughter of the general in desperation to save her father walked to the ends the earth and sought the witch. The witch, be sure of that, not a witch, but THE witch, respect has to be given where it is due (your father said that).

 

5\. Here is the bargain: what would you do to save your father? Answer: I would move heaven and earth. Pretend it is only rhetoric not reality.

 

6\. Breathe.

 

7\. Breathe again.

 

8\. Translate badly. Let them think fortune, fate, destiny- it is kinder to you, let them think you did not choose this, that you knew the price and choose to pay. You chose this, design the road, picked out the paving stones, and mortared them all the merry way to hell. Fuck good intentions, you wanted your father back.

 

Hitsuzen, indeed.

 

9\. Don’t cackle. Remember the children haven’t quite developed the palate for irony yet- they still believe in white hats and blacks hats and saving the world. You lived long enough to see yourself becoming a milliner, opening a little shop, and taking tea with Aster on your every unbirthday (he would look fetching in a fedora and you would be smashing in a montera, given your penchant for grabbing the bull by the horns and trampling through life like it was a china shop.)  If they asked you could tell them how the constellations chimed as they shivered and splintered through your clenching fists, how you lingered in Vienna listening to the Ludwig compose sonatas to his Giulietta and wondered how he knew.

 

10\. Try not to sideline the story.

 

11\. Speak in terms of metaphors not metaphysics (not that there is much a difference, none to be exact). So a daughter of the heavens became the earth- stop there.

 

You are not deliberately cruel. You have no bent towards malice though you wonder how much the difference matters to the lamb as the knife cuts the jugular in two. They will see what they want to see (they always do) - the lovely young lady with her butterflies, not the hurricanes that crash on the coast of China with each flap of wing.

 

Do not tell them how you do not know if you died or were being born (destruction and creation are the same, only the perspective changes, all you know it /hurt/).

 

Do not tell them how you smelled the burnt bones, the scent of your flesh and hair and clothes dissolving into a strange fire-language, the linguistics of lava and tectonic plates, the syntactic of boiling seas, how you clawed out your own tongue when you began to speak with an accent of ashes.

 

Do not tell them how you scrambled at the veins of your thighs until they cracked up in an epithermal mess, bloodless, wet with brine and black shine of basalt where your bone should be.

 

Do not tell them.

 

12\. Smile.

 

13\. If they ask, sometimes they do, if you got your father back, say yes after a fashion.

 

Do not elaborate. Even if they insist.

 

14\. Your father is no longer an abyssal abomination instead he is the sum of all human fears. And generally an ass.

 

Better this time around.

 

15\. Tell a truth: all stories are lies.

 

Keep a secret just us three: the man in the moon, the witch and me.

 

You remember everything.

 

You hold the center but things still fall apart. Some rarely change- the fur on Nicholas’s hat is black instead of white. Some bounce in between- Aster moves from an island to a continent and Jack trades a hooded cloak for a hoodie. Some fall right off the map (right through your fingers no matter how hard you try) goose girls, their moonlit knights, the sweet summer girls (she was more yours than the moon’s no matter what he claims and Jack’s more than anyone’s) but you will not regret.

 

Heal what has been hurt, change the fate's design, save what has been lost, bring back what once was mine, you hum under your breath while the children look at you sideways and you try not to tell Sanderson he seems shorter this time around. Hardy and Hutton have nothing on you; you will get your father back.

**Author's Note:**

> References
> 
> Hitsuzen- guess the crossover.
> 
> Ludwig compose sonatas- Moonlight Sonata
> 
> a daughter of the heavens became the earth- Seraphina becomes Mother Nature at least is not an angel pun.
> 
> the lovely young lady with her butterflies- see deviant art and Pitch dreaming of butterflies in the movie when Sandy hits him.
> 
> the hurricanes that crash on the coast of China with each flap of wing- butterfly effect, man, nobody messes with Mother Nature.
> 
> Your father is no longer an abyssal abomination- the change of Book!Pitch to Movie!Pitch
> 
> goose girls- Katherine from GoC and potentially Moother Goose
> 
> moonlit knights- Nitelight from GOC
> 
> sweet summer girls- Rapunzel from Tangled and an incarnation of summer in my fic 'a garland of your crowning glory'
> 
> Heal what has been hurt, change the fate's design- Healing Song from Tangled, Mother Nature is rather fond of 'her' daughters as much as a tangential elemental relationship can be said to exist. 
> 
> Hutton, Hardy- Hardy's paradox: How can we make inferences about past events that we haven't observed while at the same time acknowledge that the act of observing it affects the reality we are inferring to? Hutton's Paradox: If asking oneself "Am I dreaming?" in a dream proves that one is, what does it prove in waking life?
> 
>  
> 
> So basically, the universe is malleable and why most of humanity loses faith as they grow up, a instinctive reaction to reality sliding around their minds like quicksand, some people escape that fate but are far more likely to slip between the cracks. Only a few beings remember all the different worlds, like Mother Nature and the Man in the Moon. How sane they remain is a matter of debate.
> 
> And I don't know exactly where Katherine, Nightlight, and Rapunzel are wandering around after stopping the apocalypse (and resetting the world with themselves on the outside). 
> 
> So yeah, head canon, Jack wasn't alone for 300 years without a clue, he had a lover, a companion, his complement and counterpart (summer and winter go better than cold and dark in my opinion) and had good relations with the other Guardians early on. It helps because the girls actually communicate instead of snarking at each other. And then ragnarok and the world gets rewritten. 
> 
> And Jack is alone.
> 
> And Seraphina is still waiting for her father.
> 
> And the Man in the Moon remains silent.


End file.
